Award Data

Commercial producers of nursery crops, plant seed, and food crops all require assurance of healthy planting stock. To address this need, laboratories, institutions and agencies, worldwide, use a variety of methods to examine plant materials and demonstrate that seeds, cuttings, and plants test free of pathogens. Such tests provide crops a passport to travel and give the grower confidence that a he ...

Shading vegetables and fruits can reduce temperatures resulting in improved fruit set, increase fruit size and quality, and reduce water consumption. Shading materials for reducing light intensity or transmission have been used extensively in the nursery industry as well as with large commercial growers of high value fruits and vegetables for many years. The physiological processes of plants have ...

Obesity is a growing epidemic that continues to threaten the health of both adults and children around the world. Additionally, challenging economic times and increasing food costs puts pressure on consumers to purchase lower priced meals. While there are many ingredients available that can lower fat and calorie contents of foods, their usage is somewhat limited because either their quality is not ...

USDA secretary, Tom Vilsack recently urged the Forest Service to "develop new markets" for forest by-products, which encourage healthy timber management. Small-diameter round timber is an abundant by-product of healthy timber management and could serve emerging green commercial markets if technical barriers, specifically round timber "connections", can be solved. Whole Trees Architecture and Const ...

The Illinois Soybean Association and the USDA initiated and supported the original research project that produced the prototype Global Food in 3?D and underlies the proposed new product, Global Feed in 3?D. The expected user groups were small and mid?sized farmer leaders and allied analysts and stakeholders as a result of the research's original design and goals. The research outcome of this ...

This proposal investigates methods for graphene synthesis on Si (001) orientated substrates to enable high-volume production of graphene transistors and circuits. The proposed approach to generate a surface with the proper symmetry for graphene epitaxy is to deposit symmetry transformation layers (STL) of hexagonal-symmetry materials onto Si (001) substrates that will either facilitate the direct ...

A bi-stable meta-material which rejects high amplitude harmful sound but transfers sound levels needed for the situation awareness is proposed. A threshold intensity of the sound is determined by the material design and is set to 90 dBA all signals exceeding this level will be attenuated at least at 25 dB. More specifically, the material is composed by meta-structural elements having two stable s ...

SB103-008 has the objective to develop a high speed, semi-autonomous, naval surface munition designed to travel in water at speeds in excess of 100 knots to acoustically track and engage swarms of enemy boats up to 3 miles from the munition launch point. The munition is designed to fit within the footprint of an"A-size"sonobuoy. The proposed CONOPS results in multiple operating regimes: Sub- ...

Underwater, high-speed vehicles present several design challenges. Along with the many cavity/hydrodynamic issues are included: propulsion, control, energy density, and navigation. In addition to an underwater high-speed vehicle design, this proposal describes the development of an air phase high-speed munition concept (HSM) that employs a single watery entry event. For relative shallow depth a ...

The accelerating prevalence of antibiotic-resistant bacterial strains is an increasing public health problem. While the emergence of resistant strains is unavoidable, it is exacerbated by the widespread use, inappropriate prescription and misuse of antibiotics. Development of new antibiotics is slow and costly. One alternative to antibiotics is the development of antimicrobials that target the bac ...